Superfast Broadband

Superfast Broadband is Coming – Well Maybe!?!

30th January 2014

I attended a seminar yesterday held at Newark Showground hosted by the Better Broadband for Nottinghamshire project team established by Nottinghamshire County Council. They have secured funding from the wider UK Government BDUK (https://www.gov.uk/broadband-delivery-uk) and contributed to it themselves together with funding from BT and other sponsors to generate a pot of £19.8m to provide high speed broadband to rural communities. This project effectively fills in the gaps left by BT’s commercially driven roll out of BT Infinity (the fibre optic based solution) that only will be provided where BT can make money from it, so as to give the same level of service to those areas that are not commercially viable e.g.South Scarle!

So what does this mean for us? Firstly this video explains the different types of service that will be made available by the infrastructure provider Openreach (http://youtu.be/wSEuOB-gfDA). The next question is when? The programme commences on April 1st this year and runs until 2017. The first 3 months of the programme involve some detailed surveys, identification of problems with siting of new green cabinets and then the detailed planning. The project team will communicate to each area once the decision on what type of solution is possible with dates that the service could be made available to end user being able to request it from the several ISPs (independent Service Providers) that will be offering a retail service over the Opensource network. Your existing provider, TalkTalk, BT, Plusnet, EE may well be one of these at what is likely to be only slightly more expensive than we pay for the service now. You can of course stick with the existing service if you choose. For us there is no indication of a date as yet but at least we know we are on the list to be looked at which as some of you know we were definitely off the “commercially viable” list.

The good news is even if we are not able to have fibre optic connections either back to the cabinet on Woodhill Road in Collingham that currently feed all our phone and broadband or ideally fibre direct to a new cabinet located in the village (those new BT ducts laid along the top road a few years back might come into play) we may still get a high speed service. BT have taken a 4G cellular license that would allow a connection at up to 20Mb/s. Even if none of that is possible the final part of the roll out is called the “infill” programme and that will guarantee at least 2Mb/s over the existing copper network which for some will be a marked improvement.